Poster abstracts

Poster number 2 submitted by Rohan Balakrishnan

Investigating the physiological role of translation factor LepA in E. coli

Rohan Balakrishnan (Microbiology, The Ohio State University), Kurt Fredrick (Microbiology, The Ohio State University)

Abstract:
LepA is a paralog of EF-G, conserved in all bacteria, mitochondria, and chloroplasts. Despite this high degree of conservation, strains of E. coli lacking LepA have no obvious phenotype. LepA interacts with elongating ribosomes in vivo and may be involved in membrane protein biogenesis, based on studies of Guf1, the mitochondrial homolog of yeast. However, its role in bacteria remains elusive. To address this question, we screened for mutations synthetically lethal in the absence of LepA in E. coli. The marked null allele ΔlepA::cat was moved by conjugation into each strain of the Keio collection, an ordered set of single-gene deletion strains, and those crosses failing to yield transconjugants were sought. Two Hfr ΔlepA::cat donor strains, which differed in the site of F insertion, were used in the screen. While we did not find any mutations that were synthetically lethal with ΔlepA::cat, we found several mutations that were more deleterious in combination with ΔlepA::cat. These data and their potential relevance to LepA function will be discussed.

Keywords: Translation, LepA, translation factor